


Advent: Midnight

by FyrMaiden



Series: Klaine Advent 2014 [12]
Category: Glee
Genre: Drowning, M/M, Mild Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:46:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2776979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Klaine Advent Prompt: Midnight</p>
<p>(Fast and loose with the mythology of sirens. No one dies, but someone almost drowns.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent: Midnight

Kurt Hummel slams his tankard down on the table, beer sloshing over and coating his fingers. “Midnight,” he says, his voice slurring and his eyes shifting around the crowd of onlookers. This story is old now, and familiar. He slips it on like an old coat, drawing the collar of it high around his throat. He raises the tankard again, empties it in two giant sips, and gestures for a replacement, tosses two silver coins to the boy who delivers it and winks. The boy flashes a broad grin and catches both, pocketing them easily.

“Midnight,” Kurt says again. “A calm sea. Becalmed, even. The boat hadn’t moved in days. The crew were hungry and tired and ready to believe in prayer if it would bring back the wind and move them onward, towards land. It’d been a month since dry land. They were desperate for cheap beer and good women. Or good beer and cheap women, they didn’t care. Some of them would have settled for the beer and a bed. But the calm continued, and there seemed no end to it. The water rations continued to go down, food rations grew short, and tempers grew shorter.

“Midnight, day eight. The captain is on the deck for the first time in days. As he approaches the prow, the moonlight glints across the water. And that’s when he hears it, clear and bright as the night air that carries it. A song. No one else moves. The few crew around show no indication that anything out the ordinary is happening. But he can hear it, each note clear and precise, singing. But there can be no source of the sound. None of the crew would make the sound he hears, and there is nowhere for the voice to have come from. Except -

“He leans over the side, hand curling around the wood as he searches the waters. He’s been at sea almost all his life, was born on the water, and was back on it by the time he turned eight. He’s heard the sailors talk of the creatures that live in these waters, of their songs. He’s always considered them tall tales. Sailors will say anything, especially when they’re drunk. But there it is, a shape in the water. A man, drowning, splashing, struggling against the tug of the depths.

“The captain is not a stupid man. There had been no man before, and now there is. There has been no passing boat for the man to have fallen from. And yet he feels himself drawn in regardless, feels the desperate need he has to rescue the man from his watery grave, even as the notes of the song wash over him again and again. He finds himself lowering the rowboat, and climbing down to it himself.

“When he reaches the drowning man, he is gone. The water is still again, reflecting the moonlight back at him. And then the boat rocks.”

Kurt looks around his crowd, smiles when a woman pushes a new tankard toward him. He leans forward, meets her brown eyes with his own piercing blue. She doesn’t blink, and he smiles at her.

“What happened?” she whispers, almost afraid to break the tension that snaps around him. He sits upright, straightens his shoulders. The boy behind the bar catches his eye and mouths the next line with him, a laugh dancing in his whiskey amber eyes.

“The captain grabs the sides of the rowboat,” Kurt says, gripping the edges of the table to simulate. “It rocks and rolls and he worries the boat will go over, and then fingers curl over the side, webbed fingers, but recognisable as a human hand all the same. Two hands, and strong forearms, and, slowly, the top of a head, black hair slick against the most beautiful face he’s ever seen. Brown eyes he could disappear into, wide and open and framed with thick lashes. A generous mouth that smiles easily. The captain knows, then, that he has signed his own death warrant, getting in the boat at all. Those sailors’ stories that he has drunk to his whole life have culminated in him staring into the eyes of one of them, waiting for it to draw him in, drag him down, make him belong to it forever. When it speaks, he forgets how a refusal is composed, forgets how to say no.

“When it sings, when it offers him its voice, he finds himself leaning into it, feels the cool wet of its touch on his skin and wants to feel it everywhere. He is seconds from going over when a bullet rips past his ear and into the sea, making the creature hiss and scream, its true face revealed to him in its monstrous glory for a second before it turns away and dives beneath the boat. The captain sees the thrash of its tail as it dives, and he falls back in the boat with a sigh that could almost be a sob. He thinks he’s had the luckiest escape that a sailor could have. Who returns from the touch of a siren? He’ll have a story that will make him for life, he’ll never have to sail again.

“And then the boat goes over, and he goes head first into the dark midnight waters, his lungs filling as he screams. He kicks for the surface as he rights himself, only for strong fingers to grip his legs, the weight of a body dragging him down, deeper down into the water. He cries out, and water floods into him, and he thinks, with his last black thoughts, that he should have accepted the siren’s touch. At least he would have lived.”

The gasp from the table in audible, and Kurt allows himself a small smile as he unfurls the scarf from around his throat, slowly, dramatically, revealing the fingermarks burned into his skin. “The crew,” he says, “Came in for him, dove into the water to rescue him, gripping him and tearing him from the siren’s hands. But it wasn’t going to let go without a fight. It’s fingers wrapped around his wrists, around his arms, and around his throat, choking, tearing, pulling him back, only letting go when his head broke the surface of the water. But it left him with the scars, with the proof he would always require, that he’d survived a siren’s call and lived to tell the story.”

The applause is careful, the chatter immediate, and Kurt tips his head back as hands touch his throat, pressing fingers into the scars imprinted in his skin. When the coins start to drop onto the table, he is quick to reach for them, standing when he has gathered them all, bowing for the remaining few. “Remember,” he says in parting. “To heed the siren’s song. Most men don’t survive.”

He tosses a coin the boy behind the bar, who catches it and pushes a bottle toward him, his fingers webbed and his smile wide.


End file.
